Ubuntu Reveals One Linux OS for Phones, PCs, and TVs

Re: Gesture-based UI's are terrible

bluecoyote said:Although the screenshots look pretty, the preview on the Verge looks like this is going to be a complete disaster to use in real life. Canonical simply spent too much time paying Photoshop jockeys and not enough time engineering their UI.

A real world problem- under heavy processor strain, the phone has to simultaneously handle cellular background data, the application task, any background/os tasks, and track enough points on something like a swipe (while checking it against the accidental input prevention heuristics) before it can execute an action. When an OS bogs down, it becomes plagued with unwanted stutters, hiccups, and misread input. Making that your entire OS navigation method means you're betting the farm on hyper-responsiveness (protip: Ubuntu ain't exactly project butter.)

Gestures only work as a secondary input method- and even then, I have yet to see a single use case where it's proven reliable for even an acceptable majority. It's a huge problem with Windows 8 (even though Microsoft's touch-screen heuristics aren't too terrible and get it right 90% of the time, that 10% is annoying given how frequent things such as quick-switching are) , and it's especially bad on certain apps in Android (especially Chrome, which is groan-inducing.)

Have you ever heard of webOS? Have you ever heard of QNX? These are silky smooth UI's that depend on gestures.